We use a whole lot of open source software at Brighter Planet—Ruby, Rails, and Vagrant, just to name a few. A few months ago, we decided that we wanted to take a cue from EngineYard’s OSS Community Grant program and provide meaningful financial support to the volunteer developers of important software projects.

Calling all developers: Do you maintain software critical to the GitHub-EngineYard-AWS ecosystem? Working on a scientific library for Ruby? Have an idea for a clever way to use CM1 carbon calculations? Curate an authoritative dataset? We can support and accelerate your good work. Please get in touch (#brighterplanet on Freenode, @brighterplanet on Twitter, or brighterplanet on GitHub).

We’re thrilled to welcome our first Developer Fellow, Scott Bulua. Scott’s building a plugin for TripIt that tracks the carbon footprints of users’ itineraries using calculations powered by our CM1 web service. We’ll be hearing from Scott on this blog from time to time as he develops his tool; check back for updates.

Brighter Planet helps clients identify opportunities for data-driven sustainability initiatives, designs programs around these opportunities to deliver business value, and assists with integration and development